Job 38:1-11,16-18

2 Corinthians 5:14-21

Mark 4:35-41;(5:1-20)

Psalm 107:1-32 or 107:1-3, 23-32

Pray for me, that the words I speak may be those God wants us to hear.

Today’s Old Testament lesson is from Job. I have never really “gotten” the book of Job, so I spent some time reading it this week. This story addresses an age-old question of humankind: If God is really in charge of the world, and God governs the world with justice, why do the innocent suffer?

The book is largely written in poetry. Job is the innocent sufferer, a good man who does his best to lead a Godly life. Yet he looses everything: his children, his wealth, and his health. Miserable, he goes and sits in the ash heap. His friends, saddened by his troubles, come to comfort him. Everyone sits in silence for 7 days and 7 nights. Finally Job breaks the silence, and begins to share his deep feelings with is friends. He wonders why he was ever born. Then his friends take turns eloquently presenting their points of view on why Job is miserable, and what he should do about it. But their counsel isn’t helpful to Job. They don’t really listen to him, and they have never walked in his shoes, so they never give satisfactory answers to his questions. Instead, Job continues to cry out to God, and eventually, he encounters God.

The few verses we have in today’s lesson are from God’s response to Job’s cry. God, speaking out of the whirlwind, asks Job where he was when the foundations of the earth were laid, when God harnessed the forces of the deep and set the boundaries of the ocean, with such beauty and power and greatness that even the morning stars burst into song as they watched. God’s speech, a set of rhetorical questions, point to an important truth: much as we would like to think otherwise, the human race is not the center of the universe, and human counsel does not necessarily reflect reality or God’s truth. After listening to God, Job replies, “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you.” Job experiences God on a different level, not one that has to do with human wisdom. Somehow in his suffering and longing, Job and God finally connect.

At the end of the story of Job, we still don’t have an answer to the question of why the innocent suffer. Instead we are left with a different perspective, not gained by rhetoric or reason, but by seeing that through his suffering, Job encountered God in a new way.

In the Gospel lesson, the disciples experience Jesus in a new way. They have listened to his teaching, and seen him heal people and cast out demons. But this time, they are up against a completely different foe…a storm at sea. Some of the disciples were fishermen, and they knew about storms. It’s likely they could handle a boat in a storm, even a bad storm. You can almost hear an echo of today’s psalm, with the waves beating against the boat, lifting it high and plunging it down… you can almost feel their hearts melting as they admit it’s no use, the water is coming in. They finally try their last resort…they wake up Jesus, who, exhausted from a day of teaching the multitudes, is asleep in the stern.

Well, they didn’t get what they expected…Jesus asks them why they are afraid, and where is their faith? And rather than praying for deliverance, as the people in our psalm did, and as one might expect a holy man to do, Jesus directly rebuked the wind and the sea. “Peace! Be still!” And the disciples are left wondering…who is this that even the wind and sea obey him?

Only God does such things… they begin to see him from more than a human point of view…they get a glimpse of his divinity.

The disciples were in extreme peril; Job endured terrible loss, illness, suffering. They were seeking answers to their questions, or a solution to their problem…but they got an “AHA!” moment…a new glimpse of God.

Yesterday I attended a Kairos Outside retreat. Kairos Outside is a ministry for women whose loved ones are, or have been, incarcerated. People who have been to Cursillo,  Kairos or Kairos Outside weekends form a team and put on a special 3-day retreat, where the guests can experience community in a safe and caring Christian environment. Our team spent a lot of time preparing for the weekend, but unfortunately it was cancelled. Yesterday, due to the hospitality of this congregation, we were able to hold a one-day meeting here at St. Paul’s, to gather, share our stories, and be in community together.

Some of us shared parts of the stories of our lives. I heard, over and over again, how God is at work in their lives, and sometimes also at work in the lives of their incarcerated loved ones. It sounded so much like our lesson from second Corinthians. Some of them shared how their perspectives of God, of other people, and of their loved ones have changed. How the love of Christ came to them and now urges them on. How their lives have become new.

None of this change, and healing and newness came easily. It happened because others joined them in their boat, and were willing to be about the ministry of reconciliation.

St. Paul tells us that the ministry of reconciliation is the work of all Christians. We are all in the same boat, because Christ died for all of us. The storms are out there. We encounter the loss, the suffering, we feel the outrage, we see the peril, we feel real fear. Sometimes we see people we love sinking.

But we aren’t alone. Christ is with us in a new way, as the hands and the feet and the voices and especially the hearts and ears of the others in our boat. The ministry of reconciliation begins through the care of others. Not like the friends of Job. They listened to what Job said, but they were too caught up in their own perspectives to hear what he was really saying. So they preached at him in his misery, which only made him more unhappy.

Reconciliation begins with listening. Our job is to be compassionate listeners, or as they say in KO, Listen Listen Love Love. It’s Jesus who will still the sea. It’s Jesus who will rebuke the wind. We can’t fix people. But we can admit that we are in the boat…the boat full of people for whom Christ died. We can create a space for healing in the boat, so God can work. We can listen, not only with our ears, but with our hearts.

Listening might seem a rather passive response, especially to folks who love to fix things.You just don’t know when you listen with love what it means to the other person. Sometimes you find out later that it helped, and sometimes you don’t. But God entrusts us with the ministry of reconciliation, and so we do our best. Jesus is the one whose job it is to still the storm. And God is the one who sees the results. As He reminded Job, humans are not the center of the universe. We don’t always get to know.

Consider an apple. It is easy for us to know how many seeds are in this apple. But only God knows how many apples are in each seed.

Sow the seeds of reconciliation. The creator of the universe has entrusted you with the work of planting the seeds. The instructions on the seed packet are listen, love, and pray.